In an impish thought experiment of the kind that often irritated his academic colleagues, the historian Norman Cantor once asked what it would be like for a medieval Frenchman to visit Ancient Egypt. The time-travelling knight or monk would marvel at the pyramids and the sphinx, Cantor suggested. These were “greater constructions than anything his own people could possibly build”. But when the traveller surveyed the structure of Egyptian society, “it would never occur to him to think that it was wrong”.
Where a modern liberal set down on the banks of the ancient Nile would balk at a pharaoh ruling by divine right, a minority of nobles controlling virtually all the land and huge armies of immiserated peasants toiling in the mud, to the medieval visitor, Cantor argued, such things would seem unremarkable, or even familiar.
In Cantor’s view, one of the great continuities in history was the persistence of oligarchy. From about 3000BC, society was controlled by “a small, self-sustaining” aristocratic elite. Millennia later, “as late” indeed, as “1700, the prevailing European social system was still one in which vast power, the greater part of landed wealth, and the prime control of political life belonged to the hereditary landed aristocracy”.
This is sweeping stuff — readers with nuanced views on the evolution of the feudal system in the later Middle Ages may be yelping out objections — but Cantor’s broad point is a useful one to bear in mind in this age of immensely powerful tech companies.
When I saw pictures of the Silicon Valley CEOs lined up behind Donald Trump at his inauguration, like so many medieval barons behind their king at his coronation, my thoughts flashed back to Cantor’s story. Our world of equality, social mobility and meritocracy is more recent and more fragile than we often care to remember; measured in the broadest historical terms it’s still not much more than a curiosity or an aberration. Most of our ancestors took it for granted that wealth and social position were inherited, that a peasant mattered less than a duke and that almost everyone would die in the class into which he was born.
AI threatens the part of society that’s a bulwark against feudalism
In the past few years, a number of writers have wondered whether the rise of powerful tech companies heralds not unlimited social progress but the return of our species to its default social organisation. The most electrifyingly gloomy of them is Joel Kotkin, whose 2020 book The Coming of Neo-Feudalismprovocatively suggested that society was already beginning to slip back towards the feudalism of the Middle Ages. Where the power of medieval elites rested on the control of land on which serfs toiled, Kotkin argues modern tech oligarchs monopolise the “digital territory” on which modern workers depend for their survival. Rather than rotating crops on fields owned by the lord of the manor, “digital serfs” labour on tech platforms, selling goods on Amazon, taking delivery instructions from apps such as Uber or serving up content for Google or YouTube.
Kotkin, ever-cheerful, notes that these workers are increasingly barred from social advancement. Prohibitive housing costs, stagnating wages and student debt (especially in America) are eroding social mobility. Increasingly, he argues, our society will begin to mimic the stratified and static social order of the Middle Ages, with a few tech barons presiding over armies of benighted “digital serfs” toiling in the gig economy with little hope of ever bettering their lot.
The few years that have passed since the publication of Kotkin’s book have added piquancy to his case. If you were to extend Kotkin’s argument in the same pessimistic spirit, you might point out that a major factor in the destruction of feudalism in Europe was the rise of a literate middle class. As the development of capitalism opened up new economic opportunities, the old hereditary aristocracy found itself challenged by a new class of men who owed their positions not to land but to their talents: crafty merchants, wily lawyers, sceptical journalists.
This new bourgeoisie challenged not only the economic foundations of the aristocratic system, but its intellectual credibility. In the 18th century, a flood of pamphlets and books poured forth to a newly literate public dissecting the flaws of the aristocratic order and proposing more enlightened, liberal alternatives.
For a while it seemed virtually every writer imprisoned by the French ancien régime ended up publishing a bestselling memoir of his experience. Most of the liberal revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries were led by lawyers and journalists.
But it is precisely that literate middle class which is threatened by Silicon Valley. If recent reports of disappearing graduate jobs turn out to be true, AI may hollow out precisely the section of society that has historically served as the best bulwark against feudalism. A world in which most intellectual labour is automated will be one that has as little use for ambitious men of talent as the old feudal world did.
In the really bleak version of the future, we can imagine a world in which tech companies have not only hollowed out the middle class economically, but intellectually too. If the ability to read and to reason was one of the powers that allowed the bourgeois revolutionaries to undermine the old aristocratic order with political scrutiny and new ideals, a population that is hypnotised by screens and (recent surveys tell us) losing its capacity to read and reason may be less well equipped to prevent the return of the age of oligarchy.
This, of course, is a pessimistic worst-case scenario, and one that even I think is unlikely to come to pass. But in strange times, it is worth keeping at least half an eye on the worst-case scenario. By the time we do work out how to time-travel, let’s make sure Ancient Egypt still seems horrifyingly unfamiliar
